The exam that never really ends
By Nahrizul Adib Kadri
At UM, it’s the exam season again. And there is a certain atmosphere on campus during this period of time.
The cafés become quieter. Library seats disappear before breakfast. Students walk across campus carrying fewer conversations and more notes. Even the usual question, “Where are we eating today?” is replaced with, “Where are we studying today?”
As lecturers, we notice these little changes every semester. We also notice another familiar sight: some students arrive with lecture notes highlighted in four different colours (now that they’re in PDFs they are even more colourful), convinced that the more pages they memorise, the safer they will be in the examination hall.
Perhaps that strategy worked well in school. For many of us, success in school often meant remembering as much information as possible. We revised, completed exercise after exercise, and hoped that the examination questions resembled those in the workbook. When they did, everyone went home happy. University, however, is a little different.
But that does not mean memorisation has suddenly become unimportant. Every discipline still requires a solid foundation of knowledge. Medical students need to remember anatomy. Engineering students need equations and standards. Law students need legislation and precedents. Facts still matter. But facts alone are rarely enough.
Every course that students take at university comes with a set of Course Learning Outcomes, or CLOs. They are usually introduced at the beginning of the semester, although I suspect many students only glance at them before scrolling to the lecture schedule.
The CLOs are actually the most honest part of the course. They tell students what they should be able to demonstrate by the end of the semester. A student who understands a concept can often explain it in different words, apply it to a new situation, compare it with another idea, or justify a particular decision. Two students may write very different answers to the same question and still earn equally good marks because both have demonstrated genuine understanding.
That, after all, is what higher education is supposed to nurture. In fact, if a student attempted to reproduce every PowerPoint slide shown throughout a fourteen-week semester, there probably would not be enough time to finish the examination paper. Nor would there be much value in doing so. The examination is not asking, “Can you remember everything I said?” More often than not, it is asking, “Have you understood enough to use what you have learnt?”
And the older I become, the more I realise that life after graduation follows the same principle.
Your employer is unlikely to ask whether you can quote the staff handbook word for word. They want to know whether you understand your responsibilities well enough to deliver what you promised. Clients rarely care how many textbooks an engineer has read. They care whether the bridge is safe. Patients seldom ask a doctor how many pages of medical notes they have memorised. They simply hope the doctor understands what is happening now, and what is next.
Even our personal lives work this way. Nobody congratulates us for remembering our wedding vows. The real test is whether we have understood them well enough to live by them, year after year, in ways both big and small.
Perhaps life has its own learning outcomes too, who knows? But even if there is one, they are never printed in the form of a course handbook. Nobody distributes them during orientation week. There are no lecture slides, no tutorial sessions and no final examination timetable pinned on the notice board (or the university’s website).
Yet somehow we know when someone has achieved them. We recognise the colleague who can be trusted with responsibility. The neighbour who quietly keeps their promises. The friend who listens before offering advice. The parent whose children feel safe enough to ask difficult questions. And none of these achievements come from repeating the right words.
They come from understanding what those words require of us.
As another examination season unfolds, I hope our students do well. I hope their months of effort are rewarded with results they can be proud of. But more importantly, I hope they leave each examination hall having learnt something beyond the syllabus.
Because long after the examination papers have been collected and the grades released, life will continue asking the same question.
Not what we remembered. But whether we truly understood.
The author is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, the Director of UM Press, and the Principal of Tuanku Bahiyah Residential College, Universiti Malaya. He may be reached at nahrizuladib@um.edu.my